I did like the turn between "what's happening to me" and what amounted to "oh, that."

I think my big objection about the show is Iris. The actress is great, but the way she shoved Barry after the thief was...troubling. Although the "I'm going to this science thing that I refuse to understand and we're totally not a couple" is an appropriate update to Silver Age shrewism.

Agreed on Balloonman, too, and I'm surprised there was no balloon-traverses-the-full-moon or "I'm Balloonman" bit. (The Li'l Brucie vignettes have to go, though. Do they add anything to the scripts?)

Also, since you bring it up, I feel like there've been a few semi-gratuitous Gilbert and Sullivan references, this season. Maybe there was a festival in Hollywood?

I love, for certain definitions of "love", that Alfred is doing the worst job imaginable helping Bruce through trauma that could easily break a kid. We see Bruce getting worse and worse thanks to Pennyworth's neglect, while at the same time starting to turn himself into the sort of person who could carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Episode three and he's already a better Batman than Christian Bale, having internalized that you don't take the lives of even killers (recall that Christian Bale was gonna shoot his parents' killer). Bruce's arc may be the least consequential in any given week, but it's the one I enjoy the most. David Mazouz is crazy good as Bruce Wayne.

And yeah, the Penguin is scary for once. I don't believe for a second he means any harm to Jim Gordon -- he knows Jim saved his skin and probably wants to be his friend -- the problem is what happens when Jim rejects Oswald's friendship.

(The only way I see Jim getting out of this with his head intact, and Barbara's, is if Carmine Falcone is put on trial for Oswald's murder ... then all of a sudden, Jim's keeping Oswald alive will be a forgivable transgression because it exonerates Falcone.)

I'll admit, I haven't visited The Absorbascon in a while, but when I saw Future Vibe I immediately wondered "What does Scipio think of this?" I... didn't hate it. I'm into it, which makes it different from the other two DC-based shows on right now. I'm not quite as into Gotham but I'm giving it chances. I have not given Arrow a chance at all, is that wrong?

Actually, the dissertation thing caught my attention, too. I backed up my master's thesis in four locations (physical locations -- no "cloud" back then) as well as printing hard copy regularly. When you put that much work into something, you do NOT screw around with one lousy copy.

"What the show is doing -- intentionally or not-- is providing an explanation of why none oF Batman's foes try to kill Commissioner Gordon."

Interesting ... almost like Jim Gordon is unwittingly creating a power structure outside the Falcone / Mooney system, that will ultimately render Falcone / Mooney obsolete. I figured that Jim was going to pull Bullock back -- Bullock went bad only because he didn't see any way not to until Jim came along -- but people on both sides of the law who have got Jim's back, that's wild.

Yes, that's what hooked me, I think, that criminals have basically taken control of the government and Gordon is building what amounts to a shadow government. Without that, it's just a police procedural in the worst city ever, but Gordon's taking everybody seriously and taking their needs into account makes it something different and more interesting.

Falcone pretty much laid it on the line in the pilot: Disrupt any of the factions and the resulting infighting destroys everybody's legitimacy at once. So without a new authority...

So far I've only seen the first episode of Flash. I've seen a lot of theories online about Harrison Wells having the newspaper from the future (obviously an alternate future, where there are still "newspapers" by 2024). All the theories I've seen speak of Harrison himself being from the future.

What if that's not right? What if he somehow invented technology that let him pull objects from the future into the present? A certain DC Comics character tried to do that, but never succeeded (beyond seeing his own future death at the hands of the Justice League of America, which he tried repeatedly to forestall by killing the Leaguers first).

Redforce, you now have that answer, but "Caitlyn Snow" was also one of the Killer Frosts over the years.

What surprises me about the whole Ronnie subplot is that there's no Martin Stein in evidence. You'd think a fancy reactor that makes Ronnie Raymond vanish would have been designed by (and killed) the Professor.

Loosely related, I decided to give Arrow another shot. I rejected it on the basis of the unpleasant pilot, but figured that might not be fair, given the connections with Flash.

Turns out it's actually...well, decent. But the reason I bring it up is that their recurring genius IT helper character is (for some reason conspicuously) Felicity Smoak, who became Ronnie's stepmother in the comics.

Firestorm's kind of a weird choice of mythology to bring onto another superhero's turf (or pair thereof), but seems an awful long way to go for an Easter egg...

Speaking of Firestorm and Easter eggs, I noticed the movie theater Iris and Barry were walking by (out of?) in the most recent episode had a Blue Devil movie on the marquee. I wonder what the actual likelihood of a live action Blue Devil is? They're probably saving that for season two.

John, usually in the comics there's some wonderfully comic-booky explanation, though; "unstable molecules", or similar. On TV are we just not supposed to notice? (Like we weren't supposed to notice Grandpa Munster was a vampire, yet went outside in sunlight?)

One of the things I find intriguing about the show is the thought that they are creating (again, either deliberately or inadvertently), a sort of "unified field theory" of super-powers.

If you assume that Flash is accessing another dimension (per Mark Waid) and using its energies for various speed effects, then it makes sense that others are accessing that same dimension/energy for different effects. So Weather Wizard is controlling the motion of air molecules, and also slowing them down/speeding them up to change temperatures and create weather effects.

The Mist is shifting some of his mass (and that of his clothes) to the speed dimension and using that "speed" energy to move his remaining molecules (shifting part of his mass to another dimension is really what Flash does when "vibrating through objects" -- also, frankly, when running, because F=MA, but don't get me started).

Multiplex's duplicates are energy constructs pulled from the speed dimension, so they duplicate his clothes (similarly, in the comics, Wally used to create his uniform from pure "speed force").

Heatwave and Captain Cold have weapons that are obviously speeding up/slowing down molecular motion (as Cisco notes, more or less).

And so on. I've probably put more thought into this than the writers. But that's how I rationalize it.